Describe a situation where you were involved in a conflict with a co-worker. How did you deal with it.

I was sharing development responsibilities with a co-worker and we were both making changes to the same module. We both started out with the same revision. I made my changes and checked them in. Because we started with the same revision, her changes did not include mine. So, when she checked in her code, it clobbered my work.

It was a matter of communication.

We got together and merged the two separate revisions so that they included both of our changes. And we agreed that, to keep that from happening again in the future, we would 1) notify each other when we checked in a change and 2) individually, we would take measures to make sure that we retrieved the latest revision of the code base and make sure there are no conflicts before we check it in to the source code repository.

*sigh* That's what I would have liked to happen and that's what I'd say at an interview. What really happened was she told me "don't touch my code". As pissed off as I was that she called it "her code", I tried to explain that we just needed to MERGE the changes. She said, "don't touch my code until I'm done".

It didn't matter that we could set CVS Watches on the project tree, it didn't seem to matter that CVS has an Update function, she'd have none of it.

I was getting through to her. We were getting better acquainted over time and when we ran into each other in the lunch room, I'd once in a while throw out an idea or two about how we should do things in between asking about her son and listening to her bitch about her mother-in-law.

But, I'm guessing that Management didn't want to have a big cat-fight on their hands, so they split things up carefully enough that we weren't working together anymore.